


You've Been Sleepin' In The Middle of the Bed Too Long

by LeftHandOfSnarkness



Series: I'm not drowning I'm just seeing how long I can stay down [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:33:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26321950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeftHandOfSnarkness/pseuds/LeftHandOfSnarkness
Summary: Frank needs a place to sleep for the night.All of these can be read on their own, they are only loosely connected.
Relationships: Frank Castle & Diego Hargreeves, Frank Castle/ Diego Hargreeves
Series: I'm not drowning I'm just seeing how long I can stay down [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1909315
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	You've Been Sleepin' In The Middle of the Bed Too Long

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Justin Townes Earle's "Move Over Mama"
> 
> I figured I should do at least one of these from Frank's POV

He needs a place to stay, just for a couple days. The cops are on his ass and he has more than a sneaking suspicion that Red has been dropping hints to them about his activities, like the sanctimonious little choir boy that he is. He doesn’t think they’ve figured out where he lives, but he wouldn’t put it past Red to try to track him down after his most recent job. Plus the bullet wounds that are still barely healed in his side means that running around the city is out of the question for a little bit, and he doesn’t fancy getting sepsis sleeping out on the street when he has other options. Since there is no connection, on paper, between the Punisher and the Kraken, or even between Diego Hargreeves and Frank Castle, he figures his best bet is to stay there, where no one is going to ask any questions or start wondering why a guy with a fighter's build is walking around. So he shows up at the gym, and slinks past the owner and the boxers (and no one looks twice at him, because a guy with a face full of bruises isn't exactly a novelty here) and toward the boiler room. He knocks, because Hargreeves has a habit of throwing knives first and asking questions later, and waits until the door opens. He doesn't miss the way that Diego's eyes run up and down him- quick and analytical, clearly looking for obvious injuries, before he even says anything. 

"Castle."

"Hargreeves."

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" 

Frank shrugs, tilts his head to indicate the beat-up old duffel bag slung over his shoulder. "Need a place to lay low for a night or two." And Hargreeves just nods and stands back, letting him in, just like Frank knew he would. Because somewhere after trying to kill each other they had become, if not friends, then at least people with a tacit understanding of each other. And Frank doesn’t do partners and isn’t looking for buddies, but even he has to admit that it’s a heck of a lot easier to have someone else stitch you up than it is to try and do it yourself.

"Hope you don't mind sharing the bed," Diego says, "I don't exactly have a couch, and if you sleep on the floor of this place something is definitely going to eat you. Or give you a disease." 

"Yeah, man, I hear the janitor here sucks," Frank quips, but Diego ignores him.

"I can always grab a mat from upstairs and you can have the bed," he goes on, moving around the small space, picking up random clothes and papers off the floor, apparently trying to figure out how to add a second sleeping arrangement to the small space. 

"It's fine, man, don't worry about it."

"I don't snore or kick or anything,” he goes on, “and if you want I'm sure I can track down a c-cot or something." Diego has his back turned to him, messing around with the blankets, but even from here Frank can see that the tips of his ears are turning red. And Frank has slept on the ground and in the rain, slept spread out on the hood of a HMMWV, slept in hastily-dug fighting positions filled with bottles of dip spit and piss, slept in bunkers as mortars whistled down on him, he's gone days without any sleep at all. He's slept covered in his own blood, and other people's blood and god-only-knows what, and it tugs at something in his chest that Diego is stumbling over himself to apologize, like is some sort of hardship for Frank to spend the night in a warm, clean bed with him in it. But there is no good way to tell him that, so instead Frank kicks his duffel under the table, sits down and tells Diego about the time him and one of his squads had come back from a patrol- middle of the night, at some shitty outpost that wasn't much more than some c-wire staked into the sand. They had found an LMTV with nothing in the back but a bunch of camouflage nets, and he and all his guys had climbed in, laid down on top of them in one big pile, and fallen asleep like they were in king beds at the Ritz-Carlton. By the time he gets around to describing how bad they all smelled after being out on mission nearly non-stop for a week in the desert sun, Hargreeves is laughing and the tension has dropped out of his shoulders. 

They drink beers and shoot the shit for the rest of the night, always half-listening to the police radio that is set on the counter, but everything that comes over it the police can handle, and neither of them are really in the mood for hitting the streets anyway. Eventually Diego, clearly with too much energy to burn despite the late hour, starts jabbing at the punching bag, and they talk about his upcoming bout, about Al and what a pain in the ass he is, about one of the crazy people who lives down the hall from Frank, until his eyelids start to droop, and Hargreeves laughs at him, wiping sweat off of his forehead. 

"Go to bed, old man," he says, reaching out and grabbing a towel and shower kit from the dresser, "I'm gonna go shower. Don't shoot me when I get back."

"No promises," Frank says, and Diego just snorts and heads up the stairs. Frank kicks his boots off, sets them neatly under the bed next to Hargreeves', slides one of his pistols under the pillow before climbing into bed. He takes the side closest to the wall, even though instinct tells him that he's better off on the outside, ready to shoot at anything that comes through the door. But it's Diego's bed, and even he has to reluctantly admit that if some lunatic decided they were going to break in (and boy, would *that* be the last dumb idea they'd ever had), Hargreeves would probably have them stuck full of knives before Frank was even able to get his safety off, much less ID a target. He closes his eyes and listening to the knocking sound of the boiler, the thrum of the industrial light overhead, the pat-pat-pat of rain hitting the sidewalk above them. He slows his breathing down to be in time with the drops, walks through the steps of disassembling and reassembling various weapons in his head. M9. M4. M249. He's almost asleep when he hears the door opening again, hears the sound of Diego's feet padding down the steps (doesn't think too much about the fact that he knows what Diego's movements sound like by heart), hears the click of the light being turned off, feels the dip of the mattress next to him. The last thing he hears before he finally drifts off is Hargreeves checking to make sure that his knives are where he left them by the bed, and then his long, slow breaths as he falls asleep. And if Frank sleeps better than he has in months in Diego's bed, well, no one else needs to know that.

**Author's Note:**

> "Diego and his big titty goth BF have a sleep over."
> 
> A good chunk of Frank's shitty sleeping experiences are just places I've slept. HMMWV hoods are seriously uncomfortable, and dip spit bottles are super gross.


End file.
